Orson Welles, Citizen of the World

1 Orson Welles, Citizen of the World Orson Welles was born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but he often told interviewers that he was “conceived” in either Paris or Rio. During his lifetime, he seldom remained long in one place. The second son of a prosperous, eccentric Midwestern family (his mother was a musician and a prominent suffragette, his father a factory owner, inventor, and alcoholic playboy with a second home in Jamaica), Welles became an uprooted child of divorce. He moved with his mother to Chicago, where she socialized with the city’s musical and artistic celebrities, and when she died three years later, he lived for a time with his father, who took him on a world tour that included China. When the father also died, Welles was placed under the guardianship of family friend Dr. Maurice Bernstein and educated at the elite Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, where he painted a huge school mural and designed, directed, and acted in school productions of Shakespeare and Shaw. Not long afterward, Bernstein used part of Welles’s inheritance to send him on a trip to Ireland, in hopes that the teenaged prodigy could develop his talent for landscape painting. When Welles arrived in Dublin, however, he put his painting materials aside and went to the Gate Theater, introducing himself as a veteran of the New York Theater Guild. Nobody believed his story, but he was a curious, imposing, somewhat demonic performer, and when he was given a role in an adaptation of Feuchtwanger’s Jew Süss he created a minor sensation. By the mid-1930s Welles was in New York, where his dazzling rise to fame as a performer-director of radio and stage was facilitated by the modern communications 2 industry, the Popular Front, and a partnership with producer John Houseman in the Federal Theater and the Mercury Theater (the latter, although located geographically on Broadway, was far from a mainstream organization). Welles’s resonant voice and slightly mid-Atlantic accent were in great demand on radio; he played pulp-hero Lamont Cranston on The Shadow, and on the documentary-style March of Time he impersonated multiple real-life characters. At the Federal Theater, he staged America’s first all-black production of Shakespeare: the “Voodoo” Macbeth, which transposed the play’s action to the Haitian revolution. Not long after, he created a legendary success de scandal with an improvised performance of Marc Blitzstein’s “labor opera” The Cradle Will Rock, which, because of its politics, had been closed by government censors. In 1937, he opened the Mercury Theater with a celebrated staging of a modern-dress, anti-fascist Julius Caesar; and in 1938, his radio version of the Mercury Theater (a non-commercial “workshop” produced by the CBS network), was responsible for the most culturally if not artistically significant radio drama in history—an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which created widespread panic because its first half took the form of realistic-sounding radio news announcements of a deadly space-ship attack from Mars. An early demonstration the mass media’s demagogic potential for “fake news,” the Mars broadcast made Welles a household name throughout the world, and might have landed him in prison. When a Quito, Ecuador radio station imitated his broadcast in 1941 and belatedly explained it was fake, an enraged mob set fire to the station, causing the death of a dozen people. Two executives at Radio Quito were indicted and went into hiding or left the country. Welles, on the other hand, avoided jail and received a generous Hollywood contract from RKO Pictures. Most of the work Welles had done in New York in the 1930s was stylistically and politically unified. His stage productions for the Mercury were Elizabethan dramas or revivals from the theatrical repertory of the nineteenth century, but he designed them in a late-modernist fashion influenced by such 1920s movements as German Expressionism (in the stark, in-depth staging of Julius Caesar) and Soviet Futurism (in his silent movie pastiche intended for the comic farce Too Much Johnson). In similar ways, his radio dramas were based on well-known texts such as Dracula, Treasure Island, or Heart of Darkness, but were experimental in form, notably in their emphasis on narration to create a radio-specific style. The original title for the Mercury radio show was “First Person Singular,” and it often used first-person narration to distinguish itself from theatrical storytelling. War of the Worlds was especially interesting in this regard because of its self-reflexivity; the narrators of the first half of the show were portrayed not as conventional characters but as on-the-spot witnesses of an invasion from Mars who were speaking to the audience through news microphones. Another characteristic of the Mercury Theater on stage and in radio was its sympathy with the Popular Front, a coalition of left artists and intellectuals that formed in Europe and the US in response to the rise of fascism. Welles showed a marked tendency to convert what cultural historian Michael Denning has called “middlebrow” literary classics—Hugo, Dickens, Doyle, Chesterton, Conrad, etc.—into “allegories of anti- Fascism.” Julius Caesar set the pattern by reminding the New York audience of contemporary events in Germany and Italy; Welles said he was attempting to stress “the 3 personal greed, fear and hysteria that surround a dictatorial regime,” and his emphasis on a conflict between a strong-man dictator and an occasionally ineffectual liberal would be repeated in his other projects. (The conflict between Caesar and Brutus in Caesar is echoed, for example, in the conflict between Kane and Leland in Citizen Kane and Quinlan and Vargas in Touch of Evil.) His most explicit political allegory was the 1938 adaptation of Heart of Darkness, which he broadcast twice on radio and proposed for his first film at RKO. Welles updated the Conrad story so that it began in contemporary New York and moved to an unnamed jungle somewhere in Africa or Latin America, thus transforming it into what he called a “parable of Fascism” and an “attack on the Nazi system.” As all his work, he produced a conceptual style of adaptation that foregrounded his talent for stage, radio, or cinematic magic; his productions were aesthetically fascinating and educational in both the literary and political sense. For most of his early career in New York, Welles was relatively free of mainstream commercial interests, directing government-controlled theater, non-commercial radio, and a theatrical troupe that he subsidized with his earnings as a radio actor. But as a result of the Mars broadcast, everything changed. His radio series acquired a wealthy sponsor and a new title (“The Campbell Playhouse”), plus a large budget to hire movie stars as guest performers. Meanwhile, RKO offered him virtually unheard-of largess: a three-picture deal allowing him to select his own projects, develop his own production unit, and bring the Mercury players and music composer Bernard Herrmann to Hollywood. These arrangements nevertheless had limitations. RKO regarded Welles’s experimental screenplay for Heart of Darkness, which proposed a self-reflexive prologue, a completely subjective camera, and the imperceptible welding together of long takes, as too expensive. (It didn’t help that the story involved miscegenation and that Welles’s wanted to hire many blacks.) The RKO contract eventually resulted in Citizen Kane, but Welles’s creative freedom would be increasingly inhibited. Welles’s plan for his Mercury stock company in Hollywood was to alternate between ambitious pictures such as Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons and modestly budgeted, left-wing thrillers such as Journey into Fear, which was written in part by Joseph Cotton and directed by Norman Foster. (In 1939, upon arriving in Los Angeles, Welles wrote screenplays for two unproduced thrillers, the first containing a newsreel foreshadowing the one in Kane, the second a fake radio news broadcast similar to War of the Worlds.) Kane was a spectacular debut and a cinematic fulfillment of the aesthetic and political aims of his work in New York. Formally inventive, it offered many of those in its original audience the exhilarating experience of seeing a bright, iconoclastic young artist use the means of production against one of America’s wealthiest media moguls, the proto-fascist newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who lived in California and was a power in Hollywood. Because of Hearst’s unofficial boycott of Kane and the Hollywood establishment’s resentment of the young Welles, the film never got the wide theatrical distribution it deserved. Even so, it was enormously influential for foreign cinéastes and intellectuals who saw it in the years after World War II, and for a generation of young US directors in the 1970s. In Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges described it as a “labyrinth without a center,” and in France, André Bazin praised it as a major development in the evolution of film 4 language. It was an inspiration for the critic/filmmakers at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and a touchstone for postwar international art cinema. Its gothic atmosphere was compared with Kafka; its manipulations of time, memory, and point of view reminded some viewers of Proust, Conrad, and Fitzgerald; its opening “newsreel” recapitulated the technical history of the motion-picture medium; and its shadowy search for “Rosebud” implicitly critiqued the sensationalism and voyeurism of contemporary mass media. It synthesized major schools of filmmaking—Soviet montage, German expressionism, and the Hollywood biopic—while at the same time developing a style of its own, based on wide-angle photography, extreme depth of field, and long takes.

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